Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Because the chicken was walking home from work, dreading the fact that he would have to tell his wife and baby chicks that he had just lost his job, and the traffic zooming by looked like the best escape there was. So, he boldly set one little chicken foot on the hot black asphalt, closed his eyes and raised his beak, and trotted on out, preparing for death. But to his surprise, he made it the whole way across the interstate without getting hit. So in amazement, he fluffed his feathers and looked up to the clouds, with a tear in his little eye and said "God, you must want me here for a –" but before he could finish his sentence, a homeless man grabbed him by his neck, and choked him until the last bit of life escaped his eyes, and took him back home to his box in the alley and fed his children who haven't eaten in days.

Speech of the Underworld Laureate

I want to be nothing but bones, a skeleton with a wardrobe of tattered and tattooed skin, picked out from the morgue in the night like a resale shop for life. I want to walk the streets dragging a dead dog on a metal leash while I bark my favorite obscenities to the moon. 

I want to be one of them, a creature only visible in the night or in nightmares. A person who a little girl would see from the backseat window with dreary eyes on her way home from Disney World, while awoken by the dull glow of a strange city – someone who'd haunt the hallways of the magic kingdom in her dreams and dangle her innocence over the balcony where her Prince Charming jumped to his death after being raped by Jeffrey Dahmer in a mouse costume.

I want to die in an alley with a needle in my vein and a hooker's face in my crotch, after ejaculating my brilliant ghost all the way up to its throne of rooftops that crown the abandoned highrises that ooze darkness from their windows. I want to find Shakespeare’s spirit in the afterlife and call him a pussy. I want people to read my poetry and vomit, and teachers to hide my books from their students. I want to bitch slap Billy Collins with the hand of the underworld laureate, then sip absinthe mixed with lighter fluid from a teacup and ask him what he thinks this poem means.

For Angel

Angel –

no other name

could've suited you better

you beautiful, promiscuous

atheist

bound for hell

if it exists...

And while confined on house arrest

for snorting dust

you called me in the middle of the night

to spill your demons

to the only guy who never asked you

for sex

while I jacked off to the sound

of the pain flowing

from your angelic voice –

I was always a good listener,

not for anyone else

but only for you.

And sometimes I wonder if you knew

what I was doing on the other end

while your eyes squirted endless orgasms

of tears…

I was too scared to tell you.

But it doesn't matter

because you don't talk to me anymore anyway.

I like to tell myself that you were scared too

even though you probably somehow knew

what I was doing

by the way I would breathe

when I said “keep going hun, I'm here to listen”

and you realized

I was just a creep

like everyone else

But there’s more to me than that

I hope.

Doggie style

The old dog

watches on inattentively

while I bend my girlfriend over

pull down her panties

and fuck her

doggie style.

Spot hasn't humped my leg in years

and I think he's jealous

that I've moved on

to better “tail”,

but what he doesn't know is

I never liked it

and me screaming “NO! Get the fuck away!”

only seemed to turn him on more.

So now he just sits there

with gooey eyes

and patches of dead, hairless skin

while my bitch moans

my name

and calls me

an animal.